“I’ve got something to go out in clear,” Kelly said, pulling the top sheet from the memo pad on the counter before he started to write on it with one of the stub pencils there for the purpose.
“Sir?” said the airman, raising an eyebrow.
“He’s got authorization, Larry,” said the sergeant, before Kelly, having finished with the cable address, could take out his card case again.
“I gather there’s some problem with encrypted material,” the veteran said, shuttling the code clerk’s eyes back to him as he set the miniature tape deck on the counter. He opened the case to display the workings of the recorder within. “I don’t want encryption anyway. For all I care, you can put this on the twenty-meter amateur band and beam it right off the tape.”
He paused before locking his eyes with those of the young airman. “You can get it out in clear, can’t you, despite the tie-up?”
“Yessir,” said the airman. He blinked to break eye contact so that he could look at the camouflaged recorder.
“Output’s through what would be the battery jack,” Kelly said. “You people can handle that, I’m sure.”
“Oh, yes sir,” the airman agreed, turning the memo slip to face him. He blinked again and said, “Jesus.”
The veteran smiled as their eyes met again over the counter. “No sweat, buddy,” he said. “It’ll give you something to play with while the priority channels’re busy with other people’s worries.”
“Check, sir,” agreed the airman. He managed a smile of his own. “It’s just that – I thought NSA Headquarters got even requests for furniture polish encrypted.”
“Not this time, my friend,” said Kelly as he waved to chop the conversation, then turned away. “This time the idea’s for a whole lotta people to know what went down. The medium damn well is the message.”
The door leaf swung closed behind him. “That’s that, sergeant,” the veteran said to Atwater’s expressionless face. “Let’s see about transportation.”
The hall ended in a metal door that gave out onto the airfield itself. They reached it just as a Turkish Airlines 727 was lunging skyward beyond the wire-reinforced window. As Atwater knocked on the unmarked door to the right of the metal one, the roar of the commercial jet’s engines shook the building like a terrier on a rat.
“Shine!” the sergeant called through the lessening rumble. “I got a proposition for you.”
“Is she – ” said a voice as the door opened. The speaker was a black man, five-five or six, wearing a one-piece gray flight suit. His hair was cropped so close that he could have passed for a Marine in boot camp.
When his brown, opaque eyes flickered past Atwater’s shoulder, the pilot paused with his mouth already shaped to speak the next word. “Well, Jesus and his saints,” he said instead, “it’s Monaghan, isn’t it, or have I died and gone to hell?”
“We’ve been to hell, Shine,” said Kelly with a sudden recollection of tracer bullets crisscrossing the makeshift flare path and the high-wing aircraft setting down. “It didn’t kill us, did it?”
He gave the pilot a lopsided smile. “Ready for another little jaunt? A real piece a’ cake, just a ferry run to Diyarbakir.”
Shine cocked his head and looked at the sergeant. “He got his clearances?”
“We’ve got that problem with the message traffic, like you know,” Atwater replied, looking at a corner of the Ready Room. A magazine lay open on the rumpled bunk from which the pilot had risen. “We’ll get through when we get through, but. . . . Colonel here seems to think there’s a bit of a crunch.”
“Colonel, are we?” said the pilot. “Hadn’t heard you were on quite those terms, Tommy. Guess you figure I owe you one for not going in for the rest of your team when they pulled the plug on Birdlike?”
Kelly shrugged. “I’d walked away from that one before you did, Shine. We all do what we do.”
The black grinned and traced a line across the side of his skull, miming the track of blood matting Kelly’s hair. “So-o-o,” Shine said, “a milk run, no flak a’tall. Till I come back and try to explain why I flew you, m’friend. There’s gonna be a lot of flak then.”